Chap 13: Taking Back Trump's America Serialization
Bad Personnel PLUS Bad Process is Bad Policy Is Bad Politics
The returns from [President] Nixon’s failure to staff his government with loyalists who would follow his lead and carry out his policies were now in… The chance to seize control of and redirect the government of the United States passed us by. It would not come again.
Patrick J. Buchanan, Nixon’s White House Wars83
At the end of this chapter, we are going to strap ourselves into a time machine and jump forward to the last few months of the 2020 presidential election. There, we will see how Five Strategic Failures committed in part by key White House personnel and in part by the Trump Campaign would inexorably lead to the loss of the 2020 race and the Fall of the White House of Trump.
The reason why we have thus far spent so much time on the 2016 campaign, the presidential transition, and the early 2017 days of the Trump administration has been to illustrate how, in many ways, the foundation for that 2020 defeat was already being laid by a toxic combination of the Bad Personnel, Bad Process, Bad Policy, and ultimately, Bad Politics that define those early years.
Accordingly, as a capstone to this early journey, I want to do what we often do in my native academia. This is “formalize” the underlying principle that most succinctly explains the broad thesis of this book. That thesis is an offshoot and refinement of the famous Ronald Reagan-era dictum that "Personnel is Policy."84
By this dictum, the people that you put in positions of power in any White House will tend to advance their own policy agendas. It follows that if a president fails to appoint personnel who share his or her own agenda, things can go very wrong and very quickly.
If you don’t think that is true, just re-read the Pat Buchanan quote leading off this chapter to see how long-lasting such a “Personnel is Policy” problem can be. Richard Milhous Nixon forever lost a golden opportunity to redefine the federal bureaucracy in his practical conservative image because of Bad Personnel choices.
By parallel construction in this book, Donald J. Trump lost a platinum opportunity to institutionalize a Populist Economic Nationalism across the economic and national security policy spectrums of the U.S. government. These reasons for this crushing loss are best captured in this refinement and extension of the Reagan-era dictum:
Bad Personnel PLUS Bad Process is Bad Policy is Bad Politics
DOWNLOAD THE WHOLE CHAPTER IN PDF BELOW. SPECIAL CONTENT FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Peter Navarro's Taking Back Trump's America to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.